They are not all equal or even reliable!
If you don’t know, you don’t know. but what do they know?
Verify your sources.
From where did their knowledge originate?
Older (and some newer) teachers, vocal coaches, and gurus are full of it.
They are full of misinformation and some is potentially harmful.
One vocal coach in Orlando, Florida told his students to yell and to yell often. Every ENT and speech therapist would tell you that can damage your voice. Why would a singer damage the voice on purpose?
Correct. There is no good reason.
The same vocal coach said that “the larynx goes up for high notes and down for low notes and that’s how it works.” The fact is, that is how it works incorrectly! Who would agree? Richard Miller, Seth Riggs, Roger Love, Greg Enriquez, Debra Bonner and many other successful vocal coaches. They are successful because they have students who are successful and because they do not lie or mislead students with false information, wrong information, or harmful information.
I have helped some former students of this very same Orlando vocal coach and saved them a lot of pain and strain.
One student I had, who was stylistically creative and unique, had the Orlando vocal coach recommended to her. The vocal coach was a rock singer. He didn’t understand style, other than rock. He told her that she “sang all around the melody, but not the melody.” How many R&B singers ad lib, improvise or do riffs and runs? What do jazz singers do? Ignorance is not bliss, when it is imposed on others.
When that student came to me, stage fright was eating her up. I helped her with that. I also could tell that she had what it took to be famous, but had that “trained out of her”, almost like she was lobotomized. Now she sounds bland and boring and works local gigs in a duo. As if that is not sad, in and of itself, her yelling vocal coach passed away. How many people did he harm?
The same coach had a student who later came to me. that student said that the vocal coach told him that he was fat, when he first met him. The young high school man was not obese by anyone’s standards, except for that vocal coach. The point is, why insult people like that? This was in the late 1990s, before things became so contentious.
My sources were some of the top vocal coaches in the U.S., 8 physicians, 2 speech therapists, The Center For Voice Disorders, and the aforementioned above.
Richard Miller was on the adjunct staff of the Cleveland Clinic’s Department Of Otolaryngology. Doctors must know the facts, or they cannot help anyone. Some vocal coaches deal in myths and catch phrases and they also won’t tell you that if you practice at all, you just might improve. If a vocal coach gives you bad information, it probably won’t be fatal, but it may be fatal to the life of your career.
The reliability of your sources is paramount. Computer viruses corrupt data, causing errors or worse. Bad information has corrupted the careers of many a singer.